Obscure physics words get sign language equivalents

Studying physics is tough as it is, but if you’re deaf it can seem even harder as many of the terms don’t have sign language equivalents. Now the esoteric language of physics has been translated into British Sign Language (BSL), and made available online.

The glossary of 119 physics words includes Milky Way, ampere, wavelength, vacuum and weightless. It should remove one of the barriers to deaf people taking part in science.

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“Because physics is a cognitively demanding subject, and the BSL terminology did not exist, this placed a heavy demand on teachers of deaf children and communication support workers,” says Rachel O’Neill, a lecturer in deaf education at the Scottish Sensory Centre (SSC) at the University of Edinburgh, where the system was developed.

Teaching a class of 13-year-olds the difference between mass and weight is tricky at the best of times as the terms are often used interchangeably in everyday English. If there is a deaf child in the class, it is especially hard because there is no established British Sign Language sign for “mass”, and the sign for “weight” does not convey its scientific meaning.

Metaphorical basis

Finger-spelling, meanwhile, is too time-consuming and not every deaf person can lip read. Even if they can, the mouth patterns of certain words, such as “endothermic” or “exothermic”, can be hard to distinguish.

Enter the new glossary, which is made up of 119 physics and engineering terms developed in British Sign Language (BSL) by a group of deaf scientists, led by Audrey Cameron, a chemistry teacher, and Gary Quinn from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. The glossary builds on existing signs used by the deaf community and on “the visual or metaphorical relationship to what the things are like in real life”, explains O’Neill.

The signs also build on one another to help convey the scientific relationships between the terms. The sign for mass, for example, is a fist which is then used as a basis for the sign for density (a hand around the fist) and weight (the hand and fist moving downwards).

Visualising science

O’Neill estimates that “only a handful” of deaf students who fully rely on sign language are studying physics to an advanced level in the UK.

“I have heard of schools who refused to support a pupil who wanted to do physics because they said they could not provide a support worker with the right level of subject knowledge, and the lack of signs meant it was an almost impossible task,” says O’Neill.

Had such a glossary been available when she was at school, Audrey Cameron says she would have “benefitted hugely” because the new signs “help to visualise the scientific concepts”.

The challenge now is to make sure the new terminology is picked up by teachers, support workers and students. O’Neill is optimistic but warns&colon; “We don’t know if the deaf community will take these signs on. Some may never take off.”

America’s avatars

In the US, there is an equivalent website called Signing Math & Science, which uses avatars to demonstrate the signs. Because American Sign Language (ASL) uses different handshakes to BSL and tends to rely on more finger-spelling, the SSC had to develop their own terminology rather than borrowing from the American system. O’Neill says that the sign language used in Australia, New Zealand and India is more similar to that used in the UK so they could, in theory, use the SSC glossary.

Anyone searching for the sign language for the terms “quantum” or “uncertainty principle”, however, will be disappointed as the new glossary is designed for deaf students aged 16 and under, who in the UK won’t have met those concepts yet.

Translating scientific terms into sign language isn’t just a challenge for schools, though. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, interpreters translate talks into sign language. They study papers ahead of time so they can come up with ways to sign them and have to decide whether to finger-spell or make up new terms.